If you’re an avid Evernote user like me, you may find yourself with so many notes that you’re not sure what to do with them. If you’ve read my post here: Use Evernote for a New Level of Organization, you know how to use notebooks and tags for organized Evernote notes. But even with good organization, it’s just too easy to take a note during a meeting, during a conversation, or whenever you have a thought, and then have trouble knowing how to find it later.

My organized Evernote notes tagged "books"For example, whenever anyone recommends a book to me, I’ll make a note and I’ll tag it “books”. Makes sense, right? Whenever I’m looking for a new book to read, I can just open Evernote and look at everything tagged “books”. However, my list of “books” notes had gotten quite long, and I’m not consistent with titles. So when I looked at the list, I had to look at each note to see what kind of book it’s all about.

I was not efficiently accessing my organized Evernote notes.

Organized Evernote Notes Using Table of ContentsHere’s my solution:

  1. I created a new note that is a “Table of Contents” note. It contains links to all of my “books” notes.
  2. In my Book Table of Contacts note, I’ve added some simple organization in the form of  headers, “Memoirs”, “Fiction”, and “Non-fiction”.
  3. I’ve moved my notes links around to be under the corresponding headers.

You can create an Evernote Table of Contents note a couple of different ways.

The basic way is to create a new note, title it “XXX Table of Contents” and copy/paste the links of the relevant notes into it. (You can copy the link of a note by right-clicking the note and selecting “Copy Note Link”.)

A quick and easy way to create a new TOC note is to select the notes that you want to include. Evernote will then show you a couple of options when you do this, including “Create Table of Contents Note”.

Organized Evernote Notes Using Table of Contents

 

Rename the note, give it a tag, and edit it to add headers.

Now you can see your organization at a glance and choose the note that you want to look at.

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